Originally Posted by lewstelamon01

And you felt the need to point that out why? Network cards are pretty universal--they're much the same on an uber expensive rig as they are on the wally world special.

So, perhaps some clarification should be made: The price of your rig or how expensive or "new" it is has nothing to do with latency. Since, after all, that's a common gripe that many posters like to use.

Having done tech support myself, rebuilt computers, and done networking myself, I'm pretty confident in my assessment of network cards as they relate to the age or price of a computer.

Better now?

To answer the OP:

In recent memory, there have also been several issues identified with the route to the servers, including a reoccurring issue with a data center in the Boston area, operated by Cogent Communications, specifically the bos06 relay. Run a trace and look for that specific hop, unless I'm mistaken it's in the neighborhood of hop 12-14.

Every time I've gotten any sort of rubberbanding (and it's happened to me too), usually the first thing I run is a traceroute because I like to be able to see what's going on with the route between my PC and STO. In 90% of those traces, that relay was the problem. There was the occasional one or two where that relay was fine, but I'd chalk that up to a possible bottleneck with that relay clearing up at precisely that moment.

Hell, there were even times I kept a command prompt window open while running STO just to be able to run a quick trace when needed.

PWE has attempted to work with Cogent on this issue, but it doesn't seem to be working so well.